CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS
1900-1920
BY
CARL VAN DOREN
1922
To
FREDA KIRCHWEY
PREFACE
_The American Novel_, published last year, undertook to trace the
progress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings to
the end of the nineteenth century; _Contemporary American Novelists_
undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two
decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that
in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in
writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable
portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks
their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of
living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting
materials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changed
by growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, reveal
unsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions of
time. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluid
as the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examine
the intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals and
to make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatever
general tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination.
The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists here
studied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a full
generation ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and Hamlin
Garland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those young
geniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before their
time, and by Theodore Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happily
still alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the war
and of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters and
Sinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligent
American fiction of the century has to be studied--so far as the novel
is concerned--largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement with
this naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to draw
Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to its
practices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer into
explicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balanced
independence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year 1920, marking a
peak in the triumph of one or two species of naturalism and in some ways
closing a chapter, affords an admirable occasion to take stock. This
book, indeed, was planned and begun at the close of that year and has
firmly resisted the temptation to do more than glance at most of the
work produced since then--even at the price of giving what must seem
insufficient notice to _The Triumph of the Egg_ and _Three Soldiers_
and of giving none at all to that still more recent masterpiece
_Cytherea_. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation steadily goes
on.
Acknowledgments are due _The Nation_ for permission to reprint from its
pages those portions of the volume which have already been published
there.
CARL VAN DOREN.
March, 1922.
CONTENTS
I OLD STYLE
1. Local Color
2. Romance
II ARGUMENT
1. Hamlin Garland
2. Winston Churchill
3. Robert Herrick
4. Upton Sinclair
5. Theodore Dreiser
III ART
1. Booth Tarkington
2. Edith Wharton
3. James Branch Cabell
4. Willa Cather
5. Joseph Hergesheimer
IV NEW STYLE
1. Emergent Types
_Ellen Glasgow, William Allen White, Ernest Poole, Henry B. Fuller, Mary
Austin, Immigrants._
2. The Revolt from the Village
_Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, E.W. Howe, Sinclair Lewis, Zona
Gale, Floyd Dell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Canfield, 1921._
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS
CHAPTER I
OLD STYLE
1. LOCAL COLOR
A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all
take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with
varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of
the century preceding.
There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult
of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet, and
which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened
out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county.
Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the
mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the
history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short
story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did
little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to
string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever
made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest
important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years,
is still on the whole best represented by his _Old Creole Days_; and
so--to name only the chief among the survivors--after intervals not
greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") by _In
the Tennessee Mountains_, Thomas Nelson Page by _In Ole Virginia_, Mary
E. Wilkins Freeman by _A Humble Romance and Other Stories_, James Lane
Allen by _Flute and Violin_, and Alice Brown by _Meadow-Grass_.
The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account
for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage.
The defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult
itself, which, as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of
form, first of the piquant surfaces and then--if at all--of the stubborn
deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers:
they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new,
but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found--or
thought--it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank
shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge
the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They
confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for
the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or
stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis;
they sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming
optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice
prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent the
local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans--social,
theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the
local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial,
without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of
provincialism at its best.
To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover
that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles,
created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or
beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the
great gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit
obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the
entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes
and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is,
indeed, one of the important processes of civilization. But in this case
it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local
colorists had. They scrutinized their world at the instigation of
benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with
friendship rather than with passion. And because of their limitations of
intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both
saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula.
Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a
public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest
success and not to disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this
result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted
in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams.
An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories
which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the
life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these
was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had
perished in the downfall of the old régime. Over and over they repeated
the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter
to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a
beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her
hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the
Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate
girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself,
marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a
marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to
their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their
freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff
of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly
through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel
declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his
years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once
thriving self. Mr. Page's _In Ole Virginia_ and F. Hopkinson Smith's
_Colonel Carter of Cartersville_ in a brief compass employ all these
themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations upon
them without really enlarging or correcting them. All of them were
kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are steadily
fading out like family photographs.
The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation
cycle. In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been
deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still
of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac,
sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his
representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature; romance
was in his blood. Bras-Coupé, the great, proud, rebellious slave in _The
Grandissimes_, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes
who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from
them by dying. The postures and graces and contrivances of Mr. Cable's
Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in
fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet in spite of these
conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and
beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many
points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence
working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in Mr. Cable
led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the
justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the
remainder of his life in a distant region.
The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion
in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution
only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in
its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither
era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his
observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore
down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a
curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the
literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little
body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit
upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a
contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories
are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the
whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a
significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once
as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore.
Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human
beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local
colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods
stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far
West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward
Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John
Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities of the
breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and Cumberland
Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled the free growth
of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written
about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as
few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater: how a stranger
man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native
maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her
neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until
only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and
forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves
against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but
hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in
some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by
comparison--of the world of plains and cities. These formulas, however,
resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to
be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana. The mountain people,
inarticulate themselves, have uniformly been seen from the outside and
therefore have been studied in their surface peculiarities more often
than in their deeper traits of character. And, having once entered the
realm of legend, they continue to be known by the half-dozen
distinguishing features which in legend are always enough for any type.
In the North and West, of course, much the same process went on as in
the South among the local colorists, conditioned by the same demands and
pressures. Because the territory was wider, however, in the expanding
sections, the types of character there were somewhat less likely to be
confined to one locality than in the section which for a time had a ring
drawn round it by its past and by the difficulty of emerging from it;
and because the career of North and West was not definitely interrupted
by the war, the types of fiction there have persisted longer than in the
South, where a new order of life, after a generation of clinging
memories, has moved toward popular heroes of a new variety.
The cowboy, for instance, legitimate successor to the miners and
gamblers of Bret Harte, might derive from almost any one of the states
and might range over prodigious areas; it is partly accident, of course,
that he stands out so sharply among the numerous conditions of men
produced by the new frontier. Except on very few occasions, as in Alfred
Henry Lewis's racy Wolfville stories and in Frederick Remington's vivid
pictures, in Andy Adams's more minute chronicle _The Log of a Cowboy_,
in Owen Wister's more sentimental _The Virginian_, and in O. Henry's
more diversified _Heart of the West_ and its fellows among his books,
the cowboy has regularly moved on the plane of the sub-literary--in dime
novels and, latterly, in moving pictures. He, like the mountaineer of
the South, has himself been largely inarticulate except for his rude
songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in
fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern
Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who
in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a
six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes
fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly
woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He
still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites
a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity.
The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by
the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun
in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish
manikins who infested the older "juveniles"; but Mark Twain took him up
with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has usually been the
Middle West, where a recognized lineage connects Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn with Mitch Miller and Penrod Schofield and their
fellow-conspirators against the peace of villages. The bad boy, it must
be noticed, is never really bad; he is simply mischievous. He serves as
a natural outlet for the imagination of communities which are
respectable but which lack reverence for solemn dignity. He can play the
wildest pranks and still be innocent; he can have his adolescent fling
and then settle down into a prudent maturity. Both the influence of Mark
Twain and the local color tendency toward uniformity in type have held
the bad boy to a path which, in view of his character, seems singularly
narrow. In book after book he indulges in the same practical jokes upon
parents, teachers, and all those in authority; brags, fibs, fights,
plays truant, learns to swear and smoke, with the same devices and
consequences; suffers from the same agonies of shyness, the same
indifference to the female sex, the same awkward inclination toward
particular little girls. For the most part, thanks to the formulas, he
has been examined from the angle of adult irritation or amusement; only
very recently--as by Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson--has he
been credited with a life and passions more or less his own and
therefore as fully rounded as his stage of development permits.
The American business man, with millions of imaginations daily turned
upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color
except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate
of some glittering metropolis. _David Harum_ remains his rural avatar
and _The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son_ his most popular
commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community
tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred,
in their fashion, to be monopolists when they could. Doubtless, also,
the American business man has suffered from the critical light in which
he has been studied by the reflective novelists. But though the higher
grades of literature have refused to pay unstinted tribute and honor to
men of wealth, the lower grades have paid almost as lavishly as life
itself.
Multitudes of poor boys in popular fiction rise to affluence by the
practice of the commercial virtues. To be self-made, the axiom tacitly
runs, is to be well-made. Time was in the United States when the true
hero had to start his career, unaided, from some lonely farm, from some
widow's cottage, or from some city slum; and although, with the growth
of luxury in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts
on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory
to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all
instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will,
coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing
is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the
sentimentality he displays in all matters of the heart. He may hold as
robustly as he likes to the doctrine that business is business and that
business and sympathy will not mix, but when put to the test he must
always soften under the pleadings of distress and be malleable to the
desires of mother, sweetheart, wife, or daughter. Even when a popular
novelist sets out to be reflective--say, for example, Winston
Churchill--he takes his hero up to the mountain of success and then
conducts him down again to the valley of humiliation, made conscious
that the love, after all, either of his family or of his society, is
better than lucre. Theodore Dreiser's stubborn habit of presenting his
rich men's will to power without abatement or apology has helped to keep
him steadily suspected. The popular romancers have contrived to mingle
passion for money and susceptibility to moralism somewhat upon the
analogy of those lucky thaumaturgists who are able to eat their cake and
have it too.
A similar mixture occurs in the politician of popular tradition. He
hardly ever rises to the dimensions of statesmanship, and indeed rarely
belongs to the Federal government at all: Washington has always been
singularly neglected by the novelists. The American politician of
fiction is essentially a local personage, the boss of ward or village.
Customarily he holds no office himself but instead sits in some dusty
den and dispenses injustice with an even hand. Candidates fear his
influence and either truckle to him or advance against him with the
weapons of reform--failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen
and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he
holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the
other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate
and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to
outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective
novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in
ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused fatalism which
in actual American life has allowed his lease to run so long. What
justifies him is his success--his countrymen love success for its own
sake--and his kind heart. Like Robin Hood he levies upon the plethoric
rich for the deserving poor; and he yields to the tender entreaties of
the widow and the orphan with amiable gestures.
The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a
serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists
in the American young girl. Not only has she as a possible reader
established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of
sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with
her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some differences
appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of
her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily most
capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing
in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels. Yet
everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy
pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have
made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly
versed in American folkways. Though she plays at love-making almost from
the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched--a salamander, as one
novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life.
When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation;
at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens
away both thought and passion. From _The Wide, Wide World_ to
_Pollyanna_, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence
for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American
popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects;
it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America
without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs
which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers
who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the
understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable
than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls
grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its
best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows
of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently
made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are
nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes
as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity
to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to
the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love
story written in America. How could there be when green girls were the
sole heroines and censors?
Among the older women created by the local color generation there were
certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities
who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most
part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold and as
hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as Mary
Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer to
reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States:
the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the
functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her
society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has
served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their
domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields.
They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to
love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless
labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the
strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery.
The combination of functions has probably done much to increase
sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new
species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in
the national life. Local color, however, taking the species for granted,
seems hardly to have been aware of its significant existence.
Only New England emphasized a distinct type: the old maid. She has been
studied in that section as in no other quarter of the world. Expansion
and emigration after the Civil War drew very heavily upon the declining
Puritan stock; and naturally the young men left their native farms and
villages more numerously than the young women, who remained behind and
in many cases never married. Local fiction fell very largely into the
hands of women--Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne
Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown--who broke completely with
the age-old tradition of ridiculing spinsters no longer young. In the
little cycles which these story-tellers elaborated the old maid is
likely to be the center of her episode, studied in her own career and
not merely in that of households upon which she is some sort of
parasite. The heroine of Mrs. Freeman's _A New England Nun_ is an
illuminating instance: she has been betrothed to an absent,
fortune-hunting lover for fourteen years, and now that he is back she
finds herself full of consternation at his masculine habits and rejoices
when he turns to another woman and leaves his first love to the felicity
of her contented cell.
What in most literatures appears as a catastrophe appears in New
England as a relief. Energy has run low in the calm veins of such women,
and they have better things to do than to dwell upon the lives they
might have led had marriage complicated them. Here genre painting
reaches its apogee in American literature: quaint interiors scrupulously
described; rounds of minute activity familiarly portrayed; skimpy moods
analyzed with a delicate competence of touch. At the same time, New
England literature was now too sentimental and now too realistic to
allow all its old maids to remain perpetually sweet and passive. In its
sentimental hours it liked to call up their younger days and to show
them at the point which had decided or compelled their future
loneliness--again and again discovering some act of abnegation such as
giving up a lover because of the unsteadiness of his moral principles or
surrendering him to another woman to whom he seemed for some reason or
other to belong. In its realistic hours local color in New England liked
to examine the atrophy of the emotions which in these stories often
grows upon the celibate. One formula endlessly repeated deals with the
efforts of some acrid spinster--or wife long widowed--to keep a young
girl from marriage, generally out of contempt for love as a trivial
weakness; the conclusion usually makes love victorious after a
thunderbolt of revelation to the hinderer. There are inquiries, too,
into the repressions and obsessions of women whose lives in this fashion
or that have missed their flowering. Many of the inquiries are
sympathetic, tender, penetrating, but most of them incline toward
timidity and tameness. Their note is prevailingly the note of elegy;
they are seen through a trembling haze of reticence. It is as if they
had been made for readers of a vitality no more abundant than that of
their angular heroines.
It would be possible to make a picturesque, precious anthology of
stories dealing with the types and humors of New England. Different
writers would contribute different tones: Sarah Orne Jewett the tone of
faded gentility brooding over its miniature possessions in decaying
seaport towns or in idyllic villages a little further inland; Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman the tone of a stern honesty trained in isolated farms
and along high, exposed ridges where the wind seems to have gnarled the
dispositions of men and women as it has gnarled the apple trees and
where human stubbornness perpetually crops out through a covering of
kindliness as if in imitation of those granite ledges which everywhere
tend to break through the thin soil; Alice Brown the tone of a homely
accuracy touched with the fresh hues of a gently poetical temperament.
More detailed in actuality than the stories of other sections, these New
England plots do not fall so readily into formulas as do those of the
South and West; and yet they have their formulas: how a stubborn pride
worthy of some supreme cause holds an elderly Yankee to a petty,
obstinate course until grievous calamities ensue; how a rural wife,
neglected and overworked by her husband, rises in revolt against the
treadmill of her dull tasks and startles him into comprehension and
awkward consideration; how the remnant of some once prosperous family
puts into the labor of keeping up appearances an amount of effort which,
otherwise expended, might restore the family fortunes; how neighbors
lock horns in the ruthless litigation which in New England corresponds
to the vendettas of Kentucky and how they are reconciled eventually by
sentiment in one guise or another; how a young girl--there are no Tom
Joneses and few Hamlets in this womanly universe--grows up bright and
sensitive as a flower and suffers from the hard, stiff frame of pious
poverty; how a superb heroism springs out of a narrow life, expressing
itself in some act of pitiful surrender and veiling the deed under an
even more pitiful inarticulateness.
The cities of New England have been almost passed over by the local
colorists; Boston, the capital of the Puritans, has singularly to depend
upon the older Holmes or the visiting Howells of Ohio for its reputation
in fiction. Ever since Hawthorne, the romancers and novelists of his
native province have taken, one may say, to the fields, where they have
worked much in the mood of Rose Terry Cooke, who called her best
collection of stories _Huckleberries_ to emphasize what she thought a
true resemblance between the crops and characters of New
England--"hardy, sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with
calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and
rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources."
Alas that as time goes on the issues of such art seem less fruitful than
once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's _Pembroke_, one of the best
novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach
upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee
pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _Ethan
Frome_ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and
distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the
essence of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington
Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and
has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than
that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for
the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _Java Head_ to seize most
artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when
Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color of the
orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except
around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint, amusing
laureate.
Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the
_Atlantic Monthly_ the modes of fiction which were practised east of
Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New
York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock;
to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale; to Iowa and
Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to Kansas in William Allen
White; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in
Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben;
and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere
names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would
be lost. New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of
fiction; that city's pace for local color was set by the deft, bright
Richard Harding Davis, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O.
Henry--all well known figures; by the late Herman Knickerbocker Vielé,
too little known, in whose novels, such as _The Last of the
Knickerbockers_, affectionate accuracy is mated with smiling, graceful
humor; and by David Gray, too little known, whose _Gallops_, concerned
with the horsy parish of St. Thomas Equinus near New York City, contains
the most amusing stories about fashionable sports which this republic
has brought forth. In the Middle West Edgar Watson Howe and Hamlin
Garland, and in the Far West Frank Norris and Jack London, broke with
the customary tendency by turning away from pathos toward tragedy, and
away from discreet benevolence toward emphatic candor. The prevailing
school of naturalism has made its principal advance upon the passing
school of local color by a sacrifice of genial neighborliness; no less
exact and detailed in observation than their predecessors, the
naturalists have insisted upon bringing criticism in and measuring the
most amiable locality by wider standards. Here lies the essential point
of difference between the old style and the new.
It is by reference to this point that the credit--such as it is--of
being quite contemporary must be withheld from so earnest and varied a
novelist as Margaret Deland. That theological agonies like those in
_John Ward, Preacher_ were actually suffered a generation back and that
the book is a valuable document upon the times cannot explain away the
fact that Mrs. Deland herself appears to have been partly overwhelmed
by the storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in her later
novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the compulsions of
love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she tugs at Gordian
knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one slash with the
intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it possible, for
instance, that the heroine of _The Awakening of Helena Richie_ could
have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await the death of her
loathsome husband and then could have been so timid as to undergo the
perturbations over her conduct which almost break her heart in Old
Chester--suppose these contradictions might have dwelt together in
Helena, yet could Mrs. Deland not have noted and anatomized them in a
way to show that she saw the contradictions even while recording them?
Suppose that Elizabeth in _The Iron Woman_ was expected by her community
to pay superfluously for an hour's blind folly with a lifetime of
unhappiness and did undertake so to pay for it, yet could Mrs. Deland
not have pointed out that the situation was repugnant both to ordinary
common sense and to the very code of honor and stability which in the
end persuades David and Elizabeth to give each other up?
The conclusions of these novels, which to thousands of readers have
seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they
are soft--soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The
customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid
joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does
not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination are cumbered by a
too narrow--however charming--cage. Her excellence belongs to the hours
when, not trying to transcend her little Pennsylvania universe, she
brings accuracy and shrewdness and felicity to the chronicles of small
beer in _Old Chester Tales_ and _Dr. Lavendar's People_. These
strictures and this praise she earns by her adherence to the parochial
cult of local color.
2. ROMANCE
If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in
another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and
succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be
wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the
difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of
fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers"
some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it
endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and
heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests
by land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers
did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as
the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had employed
history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely
faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and
beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself.
Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it.
Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has
since so far departed from it as to produce in the _Long Roll_ and
_Cease Firing_ a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study
the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to
show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her
imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the
Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as
satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient
themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language
and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a
singer than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively.
As Miss Johnston leans upon history for her favorite staff, so James
Lane Allen leans upon "Nature." He is not, indeed, innocent of history.
His Kentucky is always conscious of its chivalric past, and his most
popular romance, _The Choir Invisible_, has its scene laid in and near
the Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the
devices of local color. His earliest collection of tales--_Flute and
Violin_--and his ingratiating comment upon it--_The Blue-Grass Region of
Kentucky_--once for all established the character which his chosen
district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held
principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history
or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be
employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general effect
of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most deliberate
hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in his art,
seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness which
are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are
situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean
youth, Instinct."
In this important program, however, he has constantly been handicapped
by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in _The Choir Invisible_, loving a woman
who though in love with him is bound in marriage to another, engages
himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that his real love is
free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds to his
engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to make two,
and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though all of them
are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral arithmetic
with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down thoughtless
cheeks. So in _The Reign of Law_ he exhibits a youth extricating himself
from an obsolete theology with sufferings which can be explained only on
the ground that the theology was too strong ever to have been escaped or
the youth too weak ever to have rebelled. And in _Aftermath_, sequel to
_A Kentucky Cardinal_, the author sentimentally and quite needlessly
stacks the cards against his hero and lets his heroine die, to bring, as
he might say, "the eternal note of sadness in." All this to show how
"Nature" holds men in her powerful hands and tortures them when they
struggle to follow the mind to liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly
true and tragic Mr. Allen can do no more than borrow the tricks of
melodrama.
Just how melodramatic his sentimentalism forces him to be has often been
overlooked because of his diction and his pictures. Though he tends to
the mellifluous and the saccharine he has in his better pages a dewy,
luminous style, with words choicely picked out and cadences delicately
manipulated. By comparison most of the local colorists of his period
seem homespun and most of the romancers a little tawdry. His method is
the mosaicist's, working self-consciously in fine materials. Movement
with him never leaps nor flows; in fact, it seems to dawdle when, too
often, he forgets to be vigilant in the interests of simplicity; it is
languid with scrupulous hesitations and accumulations. As to his
pictures, they come from a Kentucky glorified. When he says that in June
there "the warm-eyed, bronzed, foot-stamping young bucks forsake their
plowshares in the green rows, their reapers among the yellow beards; and
the bouncing, laughing, round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and
their vows," Mr. Allen is remembering Theocritus, the _Pervigilium
Veneris_, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state
and his own day. He uses local color habitually to ennoble it, and but
for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals
of an imperishable sort.
Even as it is, the _Kentucky Cardinal-Aftermath_ story has all the
quaint grace of pressed flowers and remembered valentines, and _Summer
in Arcady_, his masterpiece, has at once rich passion and spare form.
Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up
fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the
human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult
equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His
later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism
and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter
moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy.
Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus,
just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the _fin de
siècle_ scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began
his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with _The Philosophy of
Disenchantment_ and _The Anatomy of Negation_, erudite, witty challenges
to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but
enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current
French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole
equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in
part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses
and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned
from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense,
becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse
phases. In _Mary Magdalen_ he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the
splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint,
dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in
_Imperial Purple_ he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from
Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of
all their extravagances and sins; in _Historia Amoris_ he followed the
maddening trail of love and in _The Lords of the Ghostland_ the
saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind.
He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least
notable achievements. His personages in none of these novels manage to
convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and
postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal. Saltus
could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his
books. Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when
ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself.
Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could
assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could
drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs. What especially touched his
imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by
French decadence: that lust for power and sensation, those incredible
temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries. Commencing
with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or
impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering
ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine,
_The Imperial Orgy_. His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or
snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only
discipline they ever had. Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness.
Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually
checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism. To
venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and
kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks
behind corruption, malevolent though delirious.
Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue
in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period
since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes. The
ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish
almost solely in tales for boys. There is of course still a matter of
the Frontier, but it is another frontier: the Canadian North and
Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle
fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever
they may chance to lead. The performers upon such themes--the Rex
Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the
James Oliver Curwoods--march ordinarily under the noisy banner of "red
blood" and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, those
generous boys of naturalism whose temperaments carried them again and
again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later
annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their considerable
technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their recurrent
formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their enormous
popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in style or
attitude, and passes by without further obligation than to point out
that Stewart Edward White probably deserves to stand first among them by
virtue of a certain substantial range and panoramic faithfulness to the
life of the lumbermen represented in his most successful book, _The
Blazed Trail_.
This phase of life deserves particular emphasis for the reason that
there has recently been growing up among the lumber-camps from the Bay
of Fundy to Puget Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan
who is the only personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated by the
ordinary run of men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint
of the loggers than an autochthonous Munchausen, whose fame has been
extended almost entirely by word of mouth among lumbermen resting from
their work and vying with one another to see who could tell the most
stupendous yarn about Paul's prowess and achievements. The process
resembles that which in the folk everywhere has evolved enormous legends
about favorite heroes; the legend concerning Paul, however, is
essentially native in its accurate geography, in its passion for
grotesque exaggeration, in its hilarious metaphors, in its dry,
drawling, straight-faced narrative method. Exaggeration such as that in
some of these stories verges upon genius. When Paul goes West he
carelessly lets his pick drag behind him and cuts out the Grand Canyon
of the Colorado; he raises corn in Kansas prodigious enough to suck the
Mississippi dry and stop navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he
has "the last seven stories put on hinges so's they could be swung back
for to let the moon go by"; he achieves such feats of eating and
drinking and working and fighting and loving as make Hercules himself
seem a pallid fellow who should have gone upon the rowdy American
frontier to learn the great ways of adventure. Though it is true that
the legend has been developing for many years without adequate literary
use of it having yet been made, it lies ready for romance to handle; and
no discussion of contemporary American fiction can go deeper than the
surfaces without at least mentioning that hilarious chapbook _Paul
Bunyan Comes West_.
That romance is just now being slighted appears from the lamentable
hiatus into which the fame of Charles D. Stewart has lately fallen. His
_Partners of Providence_ suffers from the inevitable comparison with
_Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ which it cannot stand, though it
continues the saga of the Mississippi with sympathy and knowledge; but
_The Fugitive Blacksmith_ has a flavor which few comparisons and no
neglect can spoil. Its protagonist, wrongly accused of a murder which he
by mischance finds it difficult to explain, takes to his heels and
lives by his mechanic wits among the villages of the lower Mississippi
through a diversity of adventures which puts his story among the little
masterpieces of the picaresque. Though it is clumsily garnished with
irrelevant things, it stands out above them, racy, rememberable. The
blacksmith has an ingenuity as varied as his experiences. Whereas other
picaroes cheat or fight or love their ways, this hero uses his dexterity
at unaccustomed trades until it is little less than intoxicating to see
him rise to each emergency. He is a proletarian Odysseus, and his
history is a quaint _Odyssey_ of the roving artisan.
The matter of the Civil War, though very large in the American memory,
has in literature not quite reached a parity with the older matters of
the Settlement, the Revolution, and the Frontier, principally, no doubt,
because there has been only one period--and that a brief one--of
historical romance since the war. In connection with this matter,
however, there has been created the legend which at present is surely
the most potent of all the legendary elements dear to the American
imagination.
Abraham Lincoln is, strictly speaking, more than a legend; he has become
a cult. Immediately after his death he lived in the national mind for a
time as primarily a martyr; then emphasis shifted to his humor and a
whole literature of waggish tales and retorts and apologues assembled
around his name; then he passed into a more sentimental zone and endless
stories were multiplied about his natural piety and his habit of
pardoning innocent offenders. Out of the efflorescence of all these
aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has
since seemed to be emerging--though the older aspects still persist as
well--a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at
once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all
grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington
Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's
reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher,
with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a
tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the
primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters,
whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most
moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and
lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World
War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then
alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the
midnight streets, mourning and brooding. It is precisely thus, in other
ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the
waves or turn the arrow aside. Without these more vulgar manifestations
Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives, in the
echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice
in many affections.
The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and
wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have
produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of
Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that
friend or neighbor. Of the various novels--from Winston Churchill's _The
Crisis_ to Irving Bacheller's _A Man for the Ages_--which have sought to
mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity,
no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme. They have
followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming
to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods
of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the
biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint.
Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a
steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the
world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance
as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time. How shall
he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene
Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon "Nature" till the soft
heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes
sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts
appetites uncounted? Popularity has its arts no less than excellence;
and so has it its own kind of seriousness. Much as the advertiser and
the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright,
they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the
fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write. They
throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude
laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift--which is really
rare not common--of calling the multitude's attention to their books in
which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty
features of banality.
How shall the patient critic dispose of Robert W. Chambers, who,
possessing in a high degree the qualities of narrative, of costume, of
dramatic effectiveness, of satire even (as witness _Iole_), has drifted
with the fashions for a generation and has latterly allowed himself to
decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels
about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of
Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the
international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to
any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat
scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very
serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate critic dispose of Frank
Harris, who was born in Ireland and who had the most conspicuous part of
his career in England, but who is a naturalized American citizen and who
has written in _The Bomb_ a vivid and intelligent novel dealing with the
Chicago "anarchists" of 1886? How shall the conscientious critic dispose
of the Owen Johnsons and the Rupert Hugheses and the Gouverneur
Morrises and the George Barr McCutcheons with all their energy and
information and good intentions and yet with their fatal lack of true
distinction?
How shall the tolerant critic dispose of the writers of detective
stories whose name is legion and whose art is to fine fiction as
arithmetic to calculus--particularly Arthur Reeve, inventor of that
Craig Kennedy who with endless ingenuity solves problem after problem by
the introduction of scientific and pseudoscientific novelties? How shall
the puzzled critic dispose of Alice Duer Miller and her light, bright
stories of fashionable life; of Edward Lucas White and his vast
panoramas of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton
Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those
energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the
late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of
the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the
most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried
critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have
created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better
things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through
current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter
Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American
tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner,
master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade,
easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist?
Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time
and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most
distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some
account of the school of fiction just now predominant.